Yeah Jeremy is a hardcore motorcycle kind of guy who loves what he does building shock and awe baggers out of a real garage that will never see a lawnmower or a pile of garden tools inside ─ just custom baggers and the equipment to build them. He’s been building them to the tune of 30 full-on custom baggers in the last ten months alone. Sounds like a pretty righteous hard working guy to me and his bikes do all the talking that’s ever needed.

 

  Carl Giggleman of Greenwood, South Carolina, knows of this clandestine location and put his money where his mouth is and asked Jeremy to build up this 2006 Harley Street Glide into a custom bagger fit for show and street duty. What he got was a wild-ass big wheel bagger that looks like it was left parked on a dark street overnight and tagged by a super-talented street artist with a soft spot for Harleys. Oh man, if it was only that simple.

 

  As we all know by now, fitting a 30-inch front wheel on a Harley tourer is not for the faint hearted as there’s a little bit more going on than just bolting on a big front wheel and riding off into the sunset. There’s a lot of hacking and whacking and measuring and welding and you don’t expect to find this sort of sophistication in a back yard garage, but apparently Jason didn’t get that memo. This type of work is no big whup to him and he’s completely at ease handling big stuff (and it is big stuff) with about four of five bikes going through this process at any given time. That’s right, not one bike at a time like you’d expect for a garage builder, but four or five depending on how late he stays up.

 

   On this striking build, Jason’s got all the right ingredients that the custom bagger recipe requires from air suspension to killer audio to custom bodywork and all the little doo-dads that make a bagger a custom. Current trends dictate what a custom bagger has to have to knock onlookers dead in their tracks and this baby’s got ‘em all so I’m not going to bother you with listing all the million components that go into this one. Suffice to say, no stone was left untouched in Jeremy’s garage.

 

   When it came time to select the big pieces for Carl’s build, Jason turned to his trusted buds to help him out. Guys like Jeremy Tumblin at L&M Machine Company for the focal point of any big wheel bagger, the big wheel. The swirling six-spoke 30-inch front wheel was machined from an even bigger slab of aluminum until the finished product was ready to takes its place of honor front and center. Once more into the breach, Butch Watson of HighRollers Cycle Seats was called upon to provide another of his myriad masterpieces in leather. Butch blows my mind with one fabulous seat after another to the point I’ve begun to think he kidnapped and retrained the Keebler Elves to do leatherwork.

 

   But the pièce de résistance of this build is the beautiful paintjob from hell that you couldn’t walk by without checking out even if you’re a bagger hater. After laying on a basic black so deep that could shine in the dark, Jeremy passed it over to another bud, Don Keller, for the no-blinking-allowed graphics. Don whipped up a controlled frenzy of colors and street-related graffiti graphics that would make a teenage tagger look for a new hobby. Neon colors never looked so good ─ not even in the ‘90s neon craze that infected the nation from coast to coast. I’ve got to assume owner Carl Giggleman is not the kind of guy who likes to lurk in the shadows of life. Jack Cofano’s lovely photos make it look like there’s electricity running through the pigment in broad daylight. Now that’s more than a paintjob, it’s street art. 

 

   So, all you would be builders, if you’ve got a hankering for a custom bike but you’ve got a limited budget, get out to your garage and spend some serious time there. It might help to know when you’re the last light on in town that there’s another guy named Jason Kurtz in another garage like yours doing the same thing at the same time. You are not alone.

 

  For more information on what’s going on in Jason’s garage late at night, check out his Facebook page and see for yourself. Garage-built is not a dirty word (or two).